"Creative Cloud" fundraiser for Inkscape

[bertob]

I think Inkscape is the tool every free software designer relies on the most. It's really sad that it's only being developed by a handful of people in their spare time, with new releases coming out every 5 years or so.

So here's a crazy idea: What if we all chipped in the equivalent of a Creative Cloud subscription every year? If everyone in this group contributed 100$ or so a year it would give the project some financial stability and it should be possible to get a developer to work on it at least part-time.

I've donated before, but when it's just me it feels like it's just a drop in the bucket. Framing it as the equivalent of a Creative Cloud subscription makes the value we're all getting from it more tangible. If there was a community effort with a lot of people, I think we'd all be more motivated, because it could actually make a difference.

This could also be the start of a closer collaboration between us as designers and the Inkscape developers (there are quite a few things about the Inkscape UI I'd love to tweak :D).

[bnvk]

So here's a crazy idea: What if we all chipped in the equivalent of a Creative Cloud subscription every year? If everyone in this group contributed 100$ or so a year it would give the project some financial stability and it should be possible to get a developer to work on it at least part-time.

Yeppppp! I love this idea. I would TOTALLY do this for InkScape and GIMP, as long as I knew there was others doing so + it was well received / wanted by the dev team so they'd put it to use (e.g. quit their days jobs or what have you).

There was actually a lot of conversation at FOSDEM around this very subject. The people at Snowdrift.coop were actually thinking about using InkScape as one of these! They need to finish their funding platform first though.

[bertob]

Exactly, and I think there's a lot of people in our community who feel this way.

Snowdrift seems cool, but in the meantime we could go with an existing platform (Patreon comes to mind, but I haven't looked into it in detail).

[Xaviju]

We can get in touch with the inkscape dev team, its easy and probably they could help us deciding what is the best way to help them improve the development (they might not need only money, but might need UX/UI designers as well).
We could drop a line into their dev list or IRC.

[bertob]

Yup, sounds good. Anyone subscribed to the Inkscape mailing list who wants to do it?
Just point them at this discussion and we'll go from there.

Otherwise I'll subscribe and contact them later today.

[Xaviju]

A nice option would be help them raise funds for the Inkscape hackfest in London this year at Libregraphics. Or ask them if we could participate as well with a design hackroom at their Inkscape hackathon to improve the inkscape interface,

[Xaviju]

@bertob you can find them at the #inkscape and #inkscape-devel IRC channel as well

[qwazix]

I'd also subscribe to this kind of fundraiser, certainly. Blender does a
similar thing with blender cloud, we could look at that for inspiration.

On Tue, Feb 2, 2016, 4:14 PM Xaviju [email protected] wrote:

@bertob https://github.com/bertob you can find them at the #inkscape
and #inkscape-devel IRC channel as well

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#3 (comment)
.

[davelab6]

Awesome! Would love to see this. Inkscape is a www.sfconservancy.org project so they are already able to take funds.

But I think really it would be better to frame this as a regular libre software development company like http://www.igalia.com or similar.

cc @christopheradams

[bertob]

@qwazix Blender Cloud is definitely a great example, but perhaps a bit high-friction in the beginning. Thinking more long-term though, it would be awesome to establish an actual "Creative Cloud" type thing that includes Inkscape, Blender, Gimp, Scribus etc.

@davelab6 what do you mean, exactly? That Inkscape should become a company which then organize this type of fundraiser themselves? Or that we should establish a company that employs developers working on other projects as well, like Gimp and Scribus?

[belenbarrospena]

FWIW, I would be happy to pay subscription as well.

[davelab6]

what do you mean, exactly? That Inkscape should become a company which then organize this type of fundraiser themselves? Or that we should establish a company that employs developers working on other projects as well, like Gimp and Scribus?

The latter.

[raucao]

I'm not sure why there needs to be any type of company right now. If anything, a foundation would be a better choice in this case imho, but even that might be unnecessary.

For starters, you could ask any team or project you want to support to sign up for something like Salt. If they do, you can give them your "creative cloud" subscription right away, and everyone else can do it too, without asking again.

In the long run, and if you want it to be more open (not via a proprietary platform), these projects can invest the time and effort to set up their own systems (possibly as a common FOSS project), after the idea has been proven to work.

Also, bundling together a whole bunch of projects is not a good idea in my opinion. It won't be long before someone will feel that funds are not distributed fairly, decisions about fund members are influenced by gatekeepers too much, plus all other usual problems that arise when you throw a bunch of money at a central organization, in order for it to reach a diverse set of organizations/teams/people.

[aoloe]

from my point of view, it would be more helpful if opensourcedesign could focus on facilitating contributions to specific aspects of the libre graphics programs.
the idea is to get companies or organizations (of course: active in the graphics field :-) to pay programmers external to the projects and implement the features/improvement they need by themselves.

of course, giving money to the guys who have been working for years on the projects looks like the better and nicer approach.
but most of the projects have few active programmers and financial incentives are only very marginally useful.

such contributions should of course be coordinated with the project(s) concerned, but the contributing organization would be in charge of meeting the quality requirements "imposed" by the project (and minimize the additional workload for the current developers).

house of open source (http://host-oman.blogspot.com), is a program that is currently doing this type of contributions...
for several reasons, the beginnings have not been easy but, now, they seem to be rather successful in implementing the support of arabic script in several graphics programs. (and teaching young local programmer how to contribute to free software)

another example is newspapersystems.com that -- if i understood the whole process correctly -- has payed two junior programmers to get scribus to process PDFs from the command line.
and they are now promoting scribus in some of their publications.

anyway, as you might have experienced, producing good ideas for libre graphics project is something you can "easily" manage.
getting in touch with the projects and explain your goal is already an harder task.
getting the project to allocate the needed resources and work on your idea is often very frustrating.
collecting founds and finding a freelance programmer might be easier...

[davelab6]

I'm not sure why there needs to be any type of company right now. If anything, a foundation would be a better choice in this case imho, but even that might be unnecessary.

I think customers care very little about these administrative implementation details; If the firm is structured as its own charity legally bound to serving the public benefit, or its own corporate foundation non-profit, or its own private for-profit company, or a project within a larger existing organization (as I run www.craftingtype.com from within TUG.org) - this is all basically irrelevant.

For starters, you could ask any team or project you want to support to sign up for something like Salt. If they do, you can give them your "creative cloud" subscription right away, and everyone else can do it too, without asking again.

Sure. But who will do the labour that the capital is raised for? Having been to most of the LGMs, it appears to me that the most productive 'hobbyist' developers contributing to libre graphics applications have US$100,000+ jobs and are completely uninterested in being involved in organised development.

A few years ago I hired @felipesanches to work on Inkscape features that I wanted, and he completed them on time and on point, but because Inkscape didn't ship for years and years, I stopped (and he tried his hand at a 3d printer startup.)

In the long run, and if you want it to be more open (not via a proprietary platform), these projects can invest the time and effort to set up their own systems (possibly as a common FOSS project), after the idea has been proven to work.

Completely agree :)

Also, bundling together a whole bunch of projects is not a good idea in my opinion. It won't be long before someone will feel that funds are not distributed fairly, decisions about fund members are influenced by gatekeepers too much, plus all other usual problems that arise when you throw a bunch of money at a central organization, in order for it to reach a diverse set of organizations/teams/people.

I suppose this reveals my assumption that I think one of the big problems facing libre graphics is the lack of suite integration that Adobe has done a lot of work on (although not enough, hehe)

I think the Patreon model of funding the person doing the labour, not "the project," resolves some of those problems.

[davelab6]

from my point of view, it would be more helpful if opensourcedesign could focus on facilitating contributions to specific aspects of the libre graphics programs.

the idea is to get companies or organizations (of course: active in the graphics field :-) to pay programmers external to the projects and implement the features/improvement they need by themselves.

+1

of course, giving money to the guys who have been working for years on the projects looks like the better and nicer approach. but most of the projects have few active programmers and financial incentives are only very marginally useful.

Yes, I think a 'first refusal' approach is respectful :)

such contributions should of course be coordinated with the project(s) concerned, but the contributing organization would be in charge of meeting the quality requirements "imposed" by the project (and minimize the additional workload for the current developers).

Right; the www.francophonie.org funding of Scribus development that never made it into trunk is a good case study in that problem.

house of open source (http://host-oman.blogspot.com), is a program that is currently doing this type of contributions... for several reasons, the beginnings have not been easy but, now, they seem to be rather successful in implementing the support of arabic script in several graphics programs. (and teaching young local programmer how to contribute to free software)

@khaledhosny can you tell us more about Host Oman?

another example is newspapersystems.com that -- if i understood the whole process correctly -- has payed two junior programmers to get scribus to process PDFs from the command line. and they are now promoting scribus in some of their publications.

I went to see them at their Pennsylvania office a couple of years ago when that was going on; they make proprietary software for classified ads sections of newspapers and are riding the print newspaper market to its inevitable end, and Scribus is one of the trains on those tracks, so they needed to integrate with Scribus and picked up some of the development.

anyway, as you might have experienced, producing good ideas for libre graphics project is something you can "easily" manage. getting in touch with the projects and explain your goal is already an harder task. getting the project to allocate the needed resources and work on your idea is often very frustrating. collecting founds and finding a freelance programmer might be easier...

+1

[aoloe]

the francophonie was "only" throwing money at it (and the 'first refusal' approach made it impossible to use the money otherwise).

[davelab6]

the francophonie was "only" throwing money at it (and the 'first refusal' approach made it impossible to use the money otherwise)

Maybe I misremember or misunderstood what happened. I guess there was no write-up or case study materials online?

[simonv3]

This is awesome. I want to point out fundclub: http://joinfundclub.com/

Basically it's an e-mail list that sends out an e-mail every month with "fund this diverse / social justice in tech" organization with 100 of your moneys. It's a different organization every month. If you don't donate you get booted off the list (the idea being that it becomes sustainable). Every month so far it's been able to generate about $6000-9000 for the relevant project and it's only been going for 6 months or so. This means that only 60-90 people have been contributing, but it's made a huge impact on the projects involved.

It'd be cool to fund open source design projects in the same way. Share some wealth.

[raucao]

Sure. But who will do the labour that the capital is raised for? Having been to most of the LGMs, it appears to me that the most productive 'hobbyist' developers contributing to libre graphics applications have US$100,000+ jobs and are completely uninterested in being involved in organised development.

So maybe the core team can/will decide to distribute those extra funds to contributors in less fortunate financial situations. It's not an easy problem to solve in open source projects with random contributors from around the globe, which is why I think experimenting with it on an existing platform for a while is the best way to find out. Hence my suggestion: if you really want to throw money at people regularly, just ask the project(s) to consider this way of funding, and if they do, everyone clicks a few buttons and you have your experiment up and running.

[khaledhosny]

@khaledhosny can you tell us more about Host Oman?

@HOST-Oman is a project by the Open Source Initiative at http://ita.gov.om (and the brain child of @Fahad-Alsaidi). The idea is to have a mentor with experience in developing free software help local young developers contribute to free software projects to gain experience in real world software development and simulate local FOSS community, while scratching the collective itch of the lacking Arabic support in many free software projects that is otherwise neglected (for lack of interest or experience of other developers). It is a kind of internship-like program; the trainees are paid to do the work they are doing.

Scribus was the initial target, but for various reasons you can’t have many people working on it simultaneously, so the work was directed to other free projects lacking Arabic support and so far patches have been submitted to ImageMagick, Darktable, LibGD, SDL_ttf, Pygame, Pillow and few others.

The whole thing is kind of an experiment and we will see how far it goes.

[davelab6]

It is a kind of internship-like program

@Fahad-Alsaidi Looking at your LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/fahad-al-saidi-9b552478 - its awesome to see a state using public funds for public software :) I'm curious about how your role came to be, so that others in state IT departments could set up similar initiatives :)

I'm also curious about your succession planning - what happens to the interns after the internship. I guess the young developers start working jobs on proprietary software when they enter the labour market...

So maybe the core team can/will decide to distribute those extra funds to contributors in less fortunate financial situations

Where is the extra? :) I think its extremely unlikely that people would spend a lot of their wages on gifts to acquaintances from their hobby. I mean, they don't gift such amounts to their swim team mates. People spend their wages on their partners, kids, parents, and their own retirement accounts.

It's not an easy problem to solve in open source projects with random contributors from around the globe, which is why I think experimenting with it on an existing platform for a while is the best way to find out. Hence my suggestion: if you really want to throw money at people regularly, just ask the project(s) to consider this way of funding, and if they do, everyone clicks a few buttons and you have your experiment up and running.

"The project(s)" typically do have donation buttons on their websites, collect funds, and use them for conference travel and such incidentals - not for paying wages.

Its different to 250 people paying $10/month for a contractor like Khaled or Felipe or whoever and getting project status and completion reports and the other stuff involved in running such a commercial activity; the customers have to be commercial users, and the libre graphics applications have to be up to commercial practicality. Sadly, since they are made by and for hobbyists, a lot of libre graphics applications are not up to that standard.

A few years ago I funded some fontforge development by running $500/seat font design workshops around the world (www.craftingtype.com) because I wanted to create a sustainable business where new users were trained, the profits from training paid developers, and the users would be converted to a subscription model. But FontForge was so bad that no one would use it after their training wheels came off and they upgraded to proprietary editors.

[raucao]

Where is the extra? :) I think its extremely unlikely that people would spend a lot of their wages on gifts to acquaintances from their hobby. I mean, they don't gift such amounts to their swim team mates. People spend their wages on their partners, kids, parents, and their own retirement accounts.

The extra from everyone in this thread wanting to pledge regular amounts to their favorite apps/projects. Not sure what swim team mates have to do with anything there.

Its different to 250 people paying $10/month for a contractor like Khaled or Felipe or whoever and getting project status and completion reports and the other stuff involved in running such a commercial activity; the customers have to be commercial users, and the libre graphics applications have to be up to commercial practicality. Sadly, since they are made by and for hobbyists, a lot of libre graphics applications are not up to that standard.

That's demonstrably not the case, as this very thread shows. People are willing to just fork over some money to the authors of the software they use with no strings or commercial requests attached. It would be up to the project to decide how to spend it.

[simonv3]

How about as an actionable proof of concept we start an e-mail list where the people subscribed subscribe because they want to commit giving money. Then we e-mail them once a month telling them to donate money to Inkscape?

It doesn't even have to be an e-mail list. It can be an issue on here saying "I pledge support of x amount each week" and everyone who comments on it will donate money. They can even add a little blurb as to why.

We publicly display all the people who have committed, or at least the amount, and then hope that that creates positive feedback and more people commit.

We can iterate from there. This is almost a zero-effort thing. It just requires people saying they will give money to actually give money.

I think there's value in saying "We, as OSD, are donating x amount of every month to this or that organization"

This isn't as much about "starting a new platform" it's about showing that community members in X (we) are going to proactively donate money to an organization that we've decided could use the help. I don't know how much we need to curate that. Inkscape is probably an excellent first target.

[davelab6]

@skddc I'm sorry if I misread you there; I thought you were suggesting that a $100,000 salary was a lot (which I don't think it is, given that it is a fresh graduate salary in Silicon Valley these days, and rent there is $3,000/month...)

The point I was making about other kinds of hobbies is that my impression is that the majority of people writing code for inkscape, gimp and scribus are doing it totally for fun in their free time, and are quite uninterested in formal organization - since that is like labour work, not free time - including proactive support of people contributing on a different basis.

simonv3> Inkscape is probably an excellent first target.

I agree! The Inkscape volunteers who hold power over the project have thoughtfully set up a structure that puts volunteers first - https://inkscape.org/en/support-us/funded-development - and it takes 6 months
for a proposed idea to become fundable in this structure. Which gives us plenty of time to pool some funds together :)

I'm willing to give $120 to Inkscape if 100 other people are.

[Troush]

Value is a king.
Nobody donates a blood or money for charity because of nothing. People see value in charity act and other people work on creating this value for acts of charity. Focusing on this thing maybe a key to solving fundraising issues.
Figure out values that we like an OSS devs can give to a donator and ask them, this is lean.

[simonv3]

I'm willing to give $120 to Inkscape if 100 other people are.

Okay, I think this is a good call to action. How do we show that 100 people have agreed with this? (I'd be happy to give too). How about changing the title of this issue? Maybe creating a new issue is a better idea - people commenting here may not have been aware they signed up to give money!

(or... someone could set up a quick survey to just gather e-mail addresses of the people who said they'd fund).

[bertob]

Thanks for all the thoughtful comments guys, this is great!

@davelab6 Interesting, I didn't know Inkscape had this kind of process in place. It's not exactly what I had in mind (this seems like it's geared towards one-off projects for individual features, not a recurring, yearly subscription), but it's definitely a good start.

I couldn't find the "jobs list" mentioned on the page anywhere though, is it publicly accessible?

[davelab6]

I filed https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape-web/+bug/1428463 about this about a year ago, and while I did chat with Bryce and Martin about it at LGM last year, it was brief...

The jobs list at that time was:

• 'Box Blur',
• 'Remove all use of GList and GSList' and
• 'SVG2 compliant flowed text'.

I would like to propose:

• harfbuzz integration, to support all the world's languages, and OpenType features. cc @n8willis

I think the most important comment on that bug is from Bryce:

The next action on my list with this is to get better descriptions for
the three pre-funded projects, so when people browse them they make
sense. I did one of the three descriptions, Tav and Josh are handling
the other two. At the meeting I hope to check status with them on
that. Once those are written we can move forward to getting the links
hooked up better.

Also, in general the funded projects procedure suggests several UI tools
that simply haven't been coded yet. If you know of anyone interested in
doing some Django dev work, I can definitely put them to work on it.
Otherwise eventually I'll get to it myself.

[davelab6]

Ah! Looks like the Inkscape board has been very active lately - http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Board_Meetings#Minutes - and the next meeting is this Friday!

Here's the relevant Inkscape board minutes from October 2, 2015:

Tavmjong> --------------------- Funded Development -----------------------

bryce> (technical irc meeting sounds like a great idea actually...)

Tavmjong> That was so long ago... I remember working on it but don't know the status.

tweenk> bryce: agree

doctormon> +1 on technical meeting.

bryce> * inkscape: Write up GSList project [Tav]

bryce> * inkscape: Finalize/polish SVG2 flowtext [Josh]

bryce> is what I have on my list

ScislaC> I'll email the devel-list re: setting a technical meeting date/time.

bryce> ScislaC, thanks

Tavmjong> I did do that. (Since then, half of the work has been done so the project will be smaller.)

bryce> Tavmjong, oh good to hear

doctormon> Great

parclytaxel> Note that I'll be on a holiday to South Korea in late November to early December so...

ScislaC> bryce: I haven't touched it for months, I can put it on my todo list for next week to get it finished up.

bryce> Tavmjong, mind doublechecking that the description is still up to date and adequate? I think we also needed deliverables identified and a few other such details. I can help with that if it isn't clear what exactly's needed.

ScislaC> parclytaxel: I'm going to suggest it for next week, don't worry about it.

parclytaxel> But that is when I will be having exams.

parclytaxel> I need to MUG!!!

ScislaC> parclytaxel: week after next?

parclytaxel> Hm, let me see..

Tavmjong> I'm looking at http://staging.inkscape.org/en/project/remove-all-use-of-glist-and-gslist/ but that isn't the latest text.

JonCruz> would be good to get some accurate performance measurements going.

bryce> ok, that's all on funded dev for now. Once those descriptions are finalized next steps are web app dev and some PR, much of which I'll own.

JonCruz> having metrics could help those

And November 6, 2015:

bryce: --------------------------- Funded Development -----------------------------

bryce: philip_rhoades, I'll chat more on that in email. :-)

philip_rhoades: OK, Cool.

jabiertxof: let me informed please

bryce: jabiertxof, will do, thanks :-)

bryce: for funded development, Martin took time to teach me the ins and outs of how to develop django apps for our site

jabiertxof: :)

bryce: I think I understand the technicals of how to do it, I've just been trying to scrape together some hacking time to get it put together.

Tavmjong: I found the site rather awkward to use.

bryce: but my preschoolers seem to soak up all my non-work time

Tavmjong: How soon do you think we can go live?

Tavmjong: teach them to code!

bryce: Tavmjong, yeah next step for me is to go through that list you made and start knocking items off

bryce: simple matter of coding and all that

bryce: my daughter loves to interrupt me at the end of the work day with requests to draw shapes and text in inkscape

bryce: last time she insisted on me teaching her how to type ë so she could write her name as Zoë

Tavmjong: I don't even know how to do that and I live in a country that uses such things....

bryce: anyway, sorry my time's so fragmented I can't begin to guess at an eta, but I'll try to get something showable by next meeting. 2nd priority after budget

bryce: Tavmjong, if you're on ubuntu... http://blogs.s-osg.org/custom-compose-keys-on-ubuntu/

bryce: anyone have anything to say on the funded devel app? else moving on...

Tavmjong: I was hoping to be able to try to get funding for the next SVG WG meeting in February but it doesn't look like it will be ready in time.

bryce: it's sad that I've been thinking we need funded projects to develop the funded project app.... :-/

philip_rhoades: bryce: Is there a link for the Funded Project app?

bryce: fwiw, I think work's going to be cutting back on travel so my likelihood of attendance is probably diminishing.

bryce: philip_rhoades, yes one sec

Tavmjong: I contacted Alex. He's willing to help organize a hackfest in Leeds.

bryce: philip_rhoades, the app itself isn't that interesting/useful right now (mostly it's just the administrative interface that works) but the design / process docs are at https://inkscape.org/en/support-us/funded-development/

And December 4, 2015:

bryce> ----------------------------------- Funded Development ---------------------------------

bryce> I've been plucking away at this over the month

Tavmjong> How close are we to being able to go live?

bryce> hard to say, I feel like I've only just started scratching the surface trying to understand what needs done

bryce> it's a non-trivial development effort

Tavmjong> It does seem to be quite complicated

bryce> I've sketched in some todo items and design thoughts and plans at http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/FundedProjectSystemDevelopment

bryce> it may go faster once I'm more comfortable with Django development, I'm still pretty newbie here

Tavmjong> Django is PHP?

bryce> the technicals are actually not that hard, and not that much code is needed to get stuff done, the hard part is mostly the design decisions of what forms are needed, where they should be plugged in, and so on

bryce> Django is Python

bryce> the form I'm focusing on right now is the application form for folks to sign up for projects

bryce> the underlying bits are already there for that, so it's just a matter of making the form and hooking it up

Tavmjong> Is there anything that a non-Django expert can help with?

bryce> I've cleaned up some of the existing project item pages, but some of that is going to require adding some new data fields to the database, which is something I've not figured out yet

bryce> hmm

bryce> like I mentioned a lot of the work right now is design stuff, so like laying out what web pages should look like, and how verbage should be phrased

bryce> mockups of things would help me out a lot

bryce> but it might be easier for me to just get the underpinnings working, with stubbed in pages

bryce> and then folks can help by bikeshedding design suggestions on top

Tavmjong> OK. Anything for the board to act on?

bryce> after the Application Form, I think the next item I'll work on is the Project Suggestion Form, and a Suggested Projects list. These last two I am aiming for being useful for GSoC

bryce> so one thing that would be helpful to know is what requirements GSoC has for our "Suggested Projects" list, so I can target fulfilling those

bryce> nothing for the board to act on, except carrying (or expanding) the funding budget for the project items

bryce> my goal is to have it in some sort of usable form in 2016.

Tavmjong> GSoC signup for mentoring organization is Feb 8-19 so it would be good to have that by then.

bryce> ok, I can set that as a target for that bit.

bryce> if someone can scare up the requirements for it, that'd save me a little time

bryce> any other questions on this or shall we move on?

And January 8, 2016:

bryce: == Sponsorship Levels ==

tweenk: obviously, the highest sponsorship level would be something on the splash screen, but looks like not everyone is OK with that

FailBit: I am not personally

bryce: tweenk, yeah that's a good discussion point. I can see that would be important but contentious

tweenk: so a level lower would be the about screen and a banner on the webpage for X months

FailBit: wait, why are we getting a splash again?

***su_v -1 on splash screen

FailBit: inkscape starts fast enough that it probably doesn't need a splash most of the time

bryce: I have to say I'm fairly anti-splash screen myself, independent of whether there is any advertising on it

FailBit: (+ the initialization of gtk/glib to create windows would be a large % of the loading time anyways…)

tweenk: FailBit: unless you have a lot of fonts

bryce: FailBit, I also suspect there's fat to trim in the startup process, although I seem to recall you disagreed. :-)

Ede_123 left the room (quit: Quit: Miranda NG! Smaller, Faster, Easier. http://miranda-ng.org/).

FailBit: tweenk: I fixed most of the fonts stuff

su_v: it's now mostly exposed when opening text and font dialog

su_v: (instead of at launch time)

su_v: and when importing a PDF file (IIRC)

tweenk: FailBit: initializing Glib takes essentially no time, not sure about GTK but that should also be fast

bryce: I can think of some other ideas that might be better than a splash screen, that we could consider

Mc-: iirc there was a wip to be able to add fonts "live" when inkscape is already running which should also be useable at inkscape launch

tweenk: bryce: OK

FailBit: tweenk: on an i7-4790k, ubuntu 14.04.3 with exactly 2000 fonts installed, startup time for inkscape takes 0.9s

FailBit: with 465 fonts intalled it takes 0.3s

ScislaC: Mc-: there was but I hadn't seen any updates on it very recently

prokoudine [~[email protected]] entered the room.

FailBit: (noting that it jumps to 2 seconds when the fill&stroke dialog is open)

bryce: so possible places for sponsorship branding in the app: Splash screen, about screen, add-on templates, default templates, distinct entries in Help menu, splash screen during the installer process, Intro page on first usage, tooltips

su_v: Mc-: the patch was mostly for reloading newly installed fonts without having to restart inkscape (rereading font caches) - how would that help with launch time?

tweenk: okay so the consensus seems to be that people are against having a splash screen for functional reasons

tweenk: another place for branding would be the background behind the page, but that's a little overkill

tweenk: I like the installer idea

bryce: more areas: status bar, dialogs, plugins/add-ons help pages

Mc-: ...

tweenk: Mc-: those are just ideas

prokoudine_ left the room (quit: Ping timeout: 245 seconds).

bryce: yeah, just throwing stuff out. Most of these will be annoying.

su_v: adverts for sponsors in the status bar? I'd then rather have it in the splash screen (and an option to disable the splash screen)

bryce: IMHO 99% of advertising is junk and annoying. Good advertising tends to look more like educational material

bryce: I don't care about cures for toenail fungus unless I actually have toenail fungus, and then I care a LOT.

Mc-: as as said earlier, imo the idea should be to thank donors, not do anything that would be considered "intrusive advertising" by anyone

bryce: so if there's any ways we can present the sponsor branding in a way that is consistent with the user's interest, that would be best

Mc-: (ie "the act of seeing the logo of a sponsor" should be a voluntary act of the user)

Mc-: (and not something we throw on the user)

bryce: I suppose what a user really wants to know about the sponsor is how that sponsor's money has helped the user's inkscape experience

tedg: I think that the key is to make it look like a thank you more than a sales opportunity. We don't want sponsors who are interested in eyeballs as much as those that are interested in the project being better.

tweenk: bryce: that would speak in favor of having a sponsors page

Tavmjong: bryce: Good point!

bryce: or maybe why they are sponsoring inkscape

tweenk: tedg: that's an important insight

bryce: tedg, agreed

tweenk: I was thinking more along the lines of "what can we trade in exchange for money/other resources for the project" but maybe that's not the right paradigm

tedg: I think that the quote is interesting, more because it would make the sponsors page more interesting to view. Or actually have some fun reasons on the installer.

bryce: another idea to mull over - instead of like tacking a logo onto an existing part of inkscape, what if it had its own area

bryce: so like we have the About screen to thank contributors, what if we had a Sponsors page

tweenk: bryce: that's what I was thinking when I mentioned the sponsors page, basically a separate dialog like the About box

bryce: and rather than just have a list of logos, maybe Inkscape-it up, like take a photo of the actual employees of the company traced into SVG

tweenk: bryce: nice idea :)

tweenk: bryce: and there would be some space to describe how the sponsorship helped

bryce: perhaps if their sponsorship helped establish a feature, that drawing could be an example of that feature

tedg: I think we want the sponsor to be able to make the SVG, something like 200x400px made by them. I think we should require it to be made in Inkscape though :-)

bryce: tedg, yeah

bryce: tweenk, ok good discussion so far. Would you like to incorporate all this and shoot to me, and I'll put it in for a board vote?

bryce: ScislaC, I want to get to your GSoC 2016 agenda item next, if you can spare a moment to discuss?

tweenk: bryce: I think it's too soon for voting, I'll make a doc with this info

bryce: tweenk, ok sounds good

[davelab6]

Looks like @opensourcedesign/people can help! :)

a lot of the work right now is design stuff, so like laying out what web pages should look like, and how verbage should be phrased, mockups of things would help me out a lot

[Moini]

Did you see https://inkscape.org/en/support-us/funded-development/ ? It's online for quite some time ;)

We would need a skilled django developer to help Bryce. There's already a solid base existing in our website code, but a lot of the user-facing part is still missing, also everything that has to do with tracking the donations themselves (there is an API for accounting available). Please contact us via our bug tracker: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1428463
A tentative 'Roadmap' for the funded development app in our django can be found here:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/FundedProjectSystemDevelopment

Oh, and the next Hackfest donation page will be published as soon as our website is stable enough after the recent update.

[Fahad-Alsaidi]

@Fahad-Alsaidi Looking at your LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/fahad-al-saidi-9b552478 - its awesome to see a state using public funds for public software :) I'm curious about how your role came to be, so that others in state IT departments could set up similar initiatives :)

Hi Dave, I hope that you can benefit from HOST_OMAN project to come up with better idea :-). The whole idea of open source in my state came after ITU's commitment toward open source, then developed later to fit local community. I believe in open source that it will benefit the local market by adding new line of business. You can read more about FOSS imitative in Oman here.

I'm also curious about your succession planning - what happens to the interns after the internship. I guess the young developers start working jobs on proprietary software when they enter the labour market

The HOST's objective is encouragement of Omanis to be in a continuous touch with international FOSS Community, and have the innovative passion to benefit the local ICT industry of Oman. From this point of view, it doesn't matter if the work in proprietary or open source software after finishing HOST program.

Now to this discussion, I think giving funds to single developer will not work, some tasks will take years to complete if one developer works alone. The second challenge is how many donors you can get ?? What the things make them give money to us ??
look to the numbers from KDE , GNOME, Blender, Ardour. if you are lucky, will get $4000 monthly which may be enough for one full time developer. What I am saying, donation is not reliable source for funding big projects.

[bertob]

@Moini I'd gladly volunteer for helping with interaction design and frontend dev stuff. I have no experience with Django, but I've worked with other MVC frameworks so I could probably contribute on HTML/CSS/templates. Let me know how I can help.

Generally speaking though, how far from completion is the system? What are the main things missing right now?

I'm asking because if it's going to take another couple of months, I'd suggest using a different system for now. Waiting for the platform to be developed in order to give money so Inkscape can be developed seems kind of inefficient...

Personally (and I think a lot of people feel this way), I'm mostly interested in seeing more Inkscape development and more frequent releases, as soon as possible - I don't really care whether it's within the "Funded Development" program, a yearly subscription, a one-off crowdfunding campaign or some other method.

[mavegap]

Why not use an approach similiar to Krita? do some kickstarter campaings for specific features and then move to the cloud subscription idea.

[mestaritonttu]

Why not help build Snowdrift?

A Matching Pledge
Each patron donates a tiny amount for each patron who joins them in supporting a project.

Edit: sorry about the fat-finger close.. pff.. what a broken UX this comment system has.

[Moini]

@bertob : That would be really great :) I'm not the one who has the full plans made up in his mind, that's Bryce. He's got some quite detailed plans, which he shared by email when I was able to invest some time into the django part of this two weeks ago. (Most of them are things I'd consider 'wishlist' at the moment, basic functionality should be the focus now), the models are there, some of the basic functionality exists (a few 'views' and 'templates' and forms), but a lot isn't really working yet.

I'd like to invite you to continue discussion about this in our bug report over at launchpad, where I have already linked a few resources for getting started:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape-web/+bug/1428463

For the hackfest donation stuff, we plan to go with the way we are using for all our donations currently, until the projects system is ready:
https://inkscape.org/en/support-us/
There has already someone volunteered for creating / updating that page and styling options are very limited in our CMS anyway. Improvement suggestions are welcome though, for any texts and images on the page :)

[simonv3]

We're going to directly talk about how to do this and further models like this in #10.